High court to take hot tax issue

The US Supreme Court has relieved Congress and the President of one of the year's hottest political potatoes: tax exemptions for private schools that discrimination by race.

Monitor correspondent Julia Malone reports the high court agreed to hear arguments, probably next fall, in a major test case involving Bob Jones University, a South Carolina school that bars interracial dating, and Goldsboro Christian Schools Inc., of North Carolina, which accepts no black students. Both institutions claim their discrimination is based on religious beliefs, and both have been denied tax-exempt status by the Internal Revenue Service. In February, a US Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily barred the IRS from granting or restoring tax exemptions to such schools.

President Reagan, who earlier this year attempted to give tax exemption to the schools, has faced a storm of protest ever since. Members of Congress and civil rights advocates warned that hundreds of so-called segregationist academies throughout the South would also seek the tax break.